Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple CEO, a role he inherited from his friend – the late Steve Jobs.
In his 15-year reign, the tech giant’s market value soared by more than $3.6 trillion, largely thanks to the iPhone.
Cook, 65, will now hand the CEO duties to Apple’s head of hardware engineering, John Ternus, on September 1 while staying on as executive chairman.
That’s similar to the transitions made by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Netflix’s Reed Hastings after they ended their highly successful tenures as CEO.
‘It has been the greatest privilege of my life to be the CEO of Apple and to have been trusted to lead such an extraordinary company,’ Cook said in a statement.
‘I love Apple with all of my being, and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with a team of such ingenious, innovative, creative, and deeply caring people.’
Although he never shook the perception that he lacked Jobs’ vision, Cook leveraged the popularity of the iPhone and other breakthroughs orchestrated by his predecessor to lift Apple to heights that seemed unfathomable when it was on the brink of bankruptcy during the mid-1990s.
The bespectacled boss of Apple, came out as gay in 2014 – the first head of a Fortune 500 company to do so.
He explained that what prompted him to make his sexuality public was the belief he could help children who were unable to speak up for themselves. This was apparently a big decision for the notoriously private Apple executive.
As he wrote in 2014: ‘While I have never denied my sexuality, I haven’t publicly acknowledged it either, until now. So let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.’
His replacement John Ternus was Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, and had been reporting to CEO Tim Cook.
Ternus leads all hardware engineering, including the teams behind iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods and Apple Vision Pro.
Apple say: ‘Throughout his tenure at Apple, John has overseen hardware engineering work on a variety of groundbreaking products across every category. ‘